Gilded contacts, gigantic heat-spreaders and high frequencies at only 1.65V voltage! How big of a performance boost we get from using high-frequency memory with a CPU at nominal speeds and during overclocking? Read our review to find out!

Kingston HyperX KHX14900D3T1K3/3GX

I have always believed that the tallest heat-spreaders belonged to Corsair Dominator memory modules. Now I realize that I was wrong: Kingston heat-spreaders are 1.5 times taller:

In fact, the memory module equipped with this heat-spreader is twice as tall as a standard memory module:

These heat-spreaders look very impressive, however, they may cause some serious difficulties during system assembly. They may prevent you from successfully installing some large CPU coolers. But you put up with whatever necessary to achieve the desired goal, which in this case is to get your memory working at high frequencies. However, the most frustrating thing about it is that all these sacrifices are absolutely unnecessary: you do not need these gigantic heat-spreaders at all. You can easily see that DDR2 Corsair Dominator memory does need tall heat-spreaders, because these modules work at higher 2.1V voltage and heat up a lot under heavy load. As for DDR3 memory from Kingston working at 1.65V, it remains cool in idle as well as burn modes. These tall heat-spreaders causing quite a bit of inconvenience are mostly created for aesthetic purposes, to make the users feel how reliable and powerful this memory solution is. There is very good proof of this assumption: Kingston also offers the same exact memory modules equipped with the traditional heat-spreaders but featuring identical specifications: they didn’t have to lower the voltage or increase the memory timings because they no longer had gigantic heat-spreaders.